New PAL Releases Roundup

Talking shop. And downloads.

News by Tom Bramwell Former Editor-in-Chief

Updated on 8 Oct 2009

Where shall we go this week? Last time on New PAL Releases Roundup we visited the future, as I tried to make a point about how games were running away from the Christmas crush and fell victim myself, typing "2010" whenever I meant "2009". Thanks to the mercy of the internet, anybody who stumbles on the corrected text now will never realise, but we all know the truth. (And I'm probably not helping myself by drawing attention to it, come to think.)

This week, however, we've got a jolly old choice of destinations, largely thanks to the last scion of colour in videogames, the Nintendo family of consoles. On the DS alone we can visit the inside of Bowser's tummy thanks to the sparkling Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, or the outer reaches of your imagination, thanks to the less sparkling but still very flashy Scribblenauts. Or there's a galaxy far, far away in Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Republic Heroes, which is to be contemplated in a review not so far, far away from publication.

Or we can go to war, obviously, since we're talking about videogames after all. This week's war is a guerrilla conflict on an island on the other side of the planet, bossed by Codemasters in the publisher's new take on Operation Flashpoint, not to be confused with the work of Bohemia Interactive in ArmA II, except in its creative goals and commercial aspirations. Behind the bike sheds, 5pm, no crosshairs. Speaking of which, since lots of you have asked nicely (well, some), we'll take a separate look at the PC version of Operation Flashpoint soon.

There's also quite a lot going on in the world of downloads this week, most notably in Frontier's LostWinds 2, the hopefully enchanting follow-up to an enchanting WiiWare launch title, which I personally found enchanting. I was pretty enchanted, for the record. Look out for a review of that at some point tomorrow afternoon, and for all the treats mentioned below in your local emporiums and download lists.

This week in shops: